As business needs and infrastructure requirements become more complex, applications arc required to contain more “intelligence” about their surroundings, about how the application should behave, and about how the application should interact with the infrastructure around it. As a result, many applications end up creating an embedded “policy engine” to serve these needs.
Initially, this was reasonable approach; however, as complexity of applications increased and as policy engines proliferated collisions between policies have increased. It is not uncommon to have 5 or 10 of these applications with policy engines operating in a variety of contexts (e.g. Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator, DB2, WebSphere, etc). Tivoli, DB2 and WebSphere are software packages available from International Business Machines Corporation of Armonk, N.Y. When these applications participate in an enterprise-wide decision there is high potential for them to be operating at cross purposes that would negatively impact the entire corporation. There is not a current method to arbitrate between policy making engines, nor is there a common method to manage hierarchies of policies. As business needs and infrastructure requirements become more complex, applications are required to contain more “intelligence” about their surroundings, about how the application should behave, and about how the application should interact with the infrastructure around it. More importantly there is need to reflect the business process flow and less the installer's configuration settings. As a result, many applications turned to using embedded policy engines.
U.S. Patent Application Publication US 2003/0120529 A1 published Jun. 26, 2003 by Hornavar et al. for VERSIONING IN A RULES BASED DECISION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM discloses a computer implemented decision management system which provides stragegy versioning by creating different strategy versions and selecting, without technical intervention, a respective strategy version of the created versions, applying, without technical interventions, the selected strategy version to determine interaction strategies, monitoring performance based on the determined interaction strategies, and refining the selected strategy version in accordance with the monitored performance.
U.S. Patent Application Publication US 2003/0125979 A1 published Jul. 3, 2003 by Dangler et al. for METHOD FOR FLEXIBLE DEFINITION AND RETRIEVAL OF BEHAVIOR AND DATA APPLICABLE TO MULTIPLE PARTICIPATING PARTIES discloses a method for guiding the decision making process prior to a company entering into an aggrement or engaging in a transaction or conducting a business event. Policies, factors, weights, and relative priorities for the factors are established for each kind of agreement, transaction or event.
U.S. Patent Application Publication US 2003/0149610 A1 published Aug. 7, 2003 by Rowan et al. for METHOD OF STRATEGIC PLANNING discloses a method for strategic planning by an entity which includes assessing a current status of the entity to use as a basis to establish a development direction for the entity.
U.S. Patent Application Publication US 2003/0187717 A1 published Oct. 2, 2003 by Crites al. for METHOD FOR MARKETING STRATEGY OPTIMIZATION discloses a marketing strategy optimization method which includes organizing a marketing strategy by plans and programs with each of the plans and programs having input metrics having a causal relationship to output measurement that describe the outcome of the strategy. Optimization includes determining input measurement that optimizes a given output for the strategy.
U.S. Patent Application Publication US 2004/0148211A1 published Jul. 29, 2004 by Honarvar et al. for DECISION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM WITH AUTOMATED STRATEGY OPTIMIZATION discloses an apparatus and method for automatically optimizing a strategy of a decision management system. A computer-implemented decision management system applies a strategy to determine actions to be taken, monitors performance based on the taken actions, and refines the strategy in accordance with the monitored performance.
U.S. Patent Application Publication US 2005/0096950 A1 published May 5, 2005 by Caplan et al. for METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CREATING AN EVALUATING STRATEGIES discloses a method and apparatus for strategy science methodology involving computer implementation which includes a well-defined set of procedures for carrying out a full range of projects to develop strategies for clients.